2025 has been the year of change for me. I said goodbye to people and things I hold dear, moved back to the other side of the globe, got a new job, rekindled some old relationships, and despite the lingering sadness in me, I have, surprisingly, found peace in this new way of life.

Finally, skin brightness – but not skin color – recorded in darkness in the sleeping panther chameleon oscillates at this infraslow rhythm, possibly reflecting blood oxygenation, and bouts of eye movements occurred markedly during one half of the cycle, which could be a marker of vigilance. 6/8

⚠️ New paper alert and what a way to end 2025! 🎉 Happy to share our story “Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals.” published today in Nature Neuroscience. Sleeping dragons 🦎 and functional ultrasound! Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/eWJHb 1/8

BREAKING: The National Institutes of Health has agreed to evaluate grant applications that were wrongfully frozen due to the Trump administration’s ideological purge of biomedical research.

A free, open-access library of high-quality organism illustrations for science communication

Dad decided to get pet fishes because “they shouldn’t take too much effort to take care of”. And of course it turned out to be exactly the opposite. 👀

More on the continuing purges at #NIH. Now 13 out of 27 institute directors have been gotten rid of. This is not normal. @jonathanwosen.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/12/27/n...

Soon you may be able to type a new Chinese character: the gender-neutral pronoun

Cool data vis!

This story is absolutely wild. Did you know that avocados change sex over the course of a day? And that it's controlled by a single ancient balanced polymorphism? This is flat our crazy

Why do babies kick in the womb? Today I'm delighted to share our latest paper, led with great creativity by postdoc @cpane94.bsky.social, in wonderful collaboration with Niamh Nowlan at UCD Dublin. "Maternal exercise rescues fetal akinesia-impaired joint and bone development" A paper thread:

0.00003 foot tall xmas tree from a Drosophila flight steering muscle 🎄 image by @anne-sustar.bsky.social

Very cool paper from @jangrundemann.bsky.social lab! Axon initial segment dynamics during associative fear learning | Nature Neuroscience share.google/GH5iaWUINB5w...

The trumpeting call of a Sandhill Crane hanging in the air. I heard a Sandhill Crane pair calling down the trail and wondered if I could see their call in the current conditions.I quickly tootled over to the Cranes, working to get an angle of where their call could be seen

Sharing this again just because... look at those beautiful signals!

iGluSnFR4 is now available @natmethods.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41... Glutamate indicators with increased sensitivity and tailored deactivation rates 🧪

NEW: Organ tuners have been leaving temperature and humidity records in little-known books for decades. 🎹 They reveal how temperatures inside churches have changed over time due to climate change and increased heating. A new scoop for The Reengineer! www.thereengineer.pro/p/church-org...

A big part of being a historian is being a detective! Who did this? Why? Where? Why does it matter in the grand scheme of things? You have to learn how to probe, how to uncover, how to read against the grain, how to find unusual sources, how to interpret those sources. How to piece together a puzzle

You can’t “trust” a scholar who actually does all of their own thinking and writing without the hallucinating bullshit machine? What?

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

⚡️Mitochondria make ATP, the energy that powers life. But in neurons, with axons up to a meter long, how do these tiny power plants stay functional in the right places? We went looking. 1/n www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I’m struggling to believe this NASA-published photo of red sprite lightning in France is real, but it seems to be so. Red sprites can appear very briefly above thunderstorms, exciting high atmospheric gases to produce vivid colour and form. Who needs aliens? 🧪⚡️🛸 📷 Nicholas Escurat, 3 Sept 2022

I can't believe this still needs to be said (and more loudly): Trans rights are human rights.

I hope this can persuade people to not be afraid of full fat food (they just taste astronomically better)

American Academy of Pediatrics has grants cut by HHS [Gift link] wapo.st/48U8yB2 1/3

The Vanity Fair photographer from the Susie Wiles story. Holy. Shit. www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/...

In my case, this painstaking labor in the process through which the science gets done. Science isn't measuring stuff in a lab. It's thinking deeply, extracting the heart of idea from the soup of thoughts running through my mind, molding it, and finding a way to communicate that idea to others.

Sabine Meyer gave her final concert last night in Bern, closing an international career that reshaped the clarinet’s place on the concert stage. Read more at moto-perpetuo.com/sabine-meyer...

This resonates strongly with me… I so wished that was enough, and I was really sad that it wasn’t.😔

I always feel lucky to work alongside the graphic designers at @pewresearch.org. This year-end roundup highlights some of their coolest data visualizations of the year and the design choices that went into them:

absolutely losing it at my 14yo's biology homework

Yet another example of what happens if we allow LLMs to become a form of epistemic grounding for society.

Sea and sky folding into each other. Just layers of cold light and dark water sliding past, the planet breathing slowly. I remember thinking how thin the boundary is between things we name and things we feel. Arctic Ocean, somewhere north of everything.

Just beautiful🤩

Well, there's a photo I never expected to see in my life. Noam Chomsky palling around with Steve Bannon.

Stunning

It’s cold, it’s rainy, it’s Friday evening and you’re half an hour early for a dinner. What could be a better way to kill time than a hot coffee and an interesting paper while having the ancient city wall as your view?

You can do this right now: Think of a person who wrote a paper you love, whose work influenced or helped you, or has made your professional life better. Search up their email address. Shoot them a quick email of thanks. It means so, so much. This is a rough time of year, share some joy.

Frog eye, frog eye. Can I have a confocal microscope to play on for 12 hrs a day again please? 👉👈🥺 🐸

It’s been two weeks since ICE took Yuanxin Zheng from his father. He is six years old. He’s still not home. This has to end.

A bit inconvenient for potential alien life forms if they’re constantly being incinerated by their own suns

I 💚💚 grading 🍨😍 #Interdisciplinaryneuroscience #basalganglia sundae @unofficialpsu.bsky.social 🎨🧠🤓

immigrants score the lowest on tests, but they also take all our jobs, while at the same time taking all the welfare and buying all the homes

We tend to think of neurons as either excitatory or inhibitory, but some neurons chemically inhibit their downstream targets while electrically exciting their neighbors. What is gained by having an inhibitory neuron excite its neighbor? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/

🧠📢 New preprint alert Large-scale ephys is exploding but spike sorting remains the computational bottleneck. A 2-hr, 6-probe Neuropixels 2.0 Quad Base session can take over a week to sort on a single machine. Here's a better solution. 🧵 #neuroskyence #compneurosky

We’re all just trying to find the guy who did this!

We used rabies virus 👾 to map how #psilocybin modifies long-range circuits 🧠, revealing network-specific reorganization that we didn’t expect. The full study is now online at Cell. @cp-cell.bsky.social Paper 👉 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... Thread for a synopsis 👉 bsky.app/profile/alex...

This is what government censorship actually looks like: defunding entire fields, deporting researchers, and quite effectively chilling speech that helps people understand how our information systems are being exploited and calls out powerful people and platforms for their bullshit.

Since I’ve picked up my camera again, I’ll try to get out there and capture something during every lunch break. These will largely be random moments that have stirred something in me- moments that I hope to catch and keep. So, here goes the first of many (hopefully) #LunchBreakPhotography posts!